After a day where I thought I was losing my mind, I think I have finally come to the root of my problem.
In short, I want to use my router to send certain traffic (youtube,netflix) through my VPN. ip route should make this simple, as long as the firmware supports pptp VPN.

Finally, almost ALL of the K26 firmware is too large for my 4MB WRT310N v1. When I try to update, the update balks and kicks out a "File is too big to fit in MTD". After some trial and error, the maximum size seems to be somewhere around 3700KB.

Has anyone found a way to work around the ip route problems in K24? The only other option I can see is taking the latest K26 source, trim out some extras, and try to compile a special build; which I am not looking forward to. Has anyone else run into this and already built such a beast?

tl;dr I can have K24 and no routing, or I can have K26 and no VPN.

I tried to slog through the 107 pages of the shibby builds thread, but I didn't see a specific build that would fix my problem.
@shibby: If you happen to read this and want to compile a version: tomato-K26-1.28.RT-MIPSR1-104-EN-VPN.trx (sized less than 3866624 / 3776KB)
I am pretty sure that would fix my entire issue!